Adventures in Letterpress!

While we are connoisseurs of digital, every now and then we like to ground ourselves back to the physical. This year we looked towards a more traditional, tactile approach for our limited run of Matmi Christmas cards, rather than the usual digital e-card/digital print.

So we kicked off with some sketches and initial mock-ups. At the end of this we left ourselves two final designs, these had to go to the vote! From an early stage in the process of the design we decided to go with letterpress, so this was a heavy influence on the whole aesthetic, reducing the colour palette and playing with negative space.

As you can see from the original, while we reduced our design down to two colours the overall feel and scene didn’t suffer at all. Infact with the interplay of the negative space and colours, it added some exploration with the viewer.

Here we were introduced to the beautiful and bold Heidelberg press. Phil helped us no end and took us through the whole process. Whilst I’ve printed on a hand operated press before it was nothing compared to this giant mechanical beast.

….Finally got our mitts on the outcome last week. They look amazing, all thanks to Phil at E.E.Chrisp!

Hopefully you will be seeing one of these in your post soon, but if not here’s a rather snazzy animated digital version here.

Thanks again to Phil at E.E.Chrisp for the wonderful technical print support.

author: Mat Lucas

Want to receive the latest news and tips from Matmi?Sign up to our newsletter

* By submitting your information you are agreeing to be contacted by Matmi. You can unsubscribe at any time by following the unsubscribe link within any of our newsletter emails.